1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to an information management device that manages information input from an information input device.
Specifically, the invention relates to an information management device which is ideal for managing information input from mobile information processing devices. More specifically, the invention relates to an information management device which is ideal for managing the information input from mobile information processing devices connected to network systems. In the present document, a mobile information processing device is defined as a mobile object that performs information processing.
2. Description of the Related Art
Conventional information management systems for mobile objects are categorized as follows:
(a) The systems usually have a database. The information input from a mobile object is registered to the database with a user-specified keyword each time a user inputs the information. The information is searched using the keywords or the search information that includes the keywords.
(b) The information input from a mobile object is registered to the database with a character or a character string. In some system, a character or a character string are generated through text processing, natural language processing, statistical processing or recognition processing of the input information, and attached to the information to be registered to the database. The information is searched using search information which includes the character or character string.
(c) The position information of a mobile object is registered to the database. The position of a mobile object is searched using its identifier. Conversely, the identifier of a mobile object is searched based on the region of its position.
Since the system (a) manages the information using the user-specified keywords or search information, it cannot search the information with a character string unless it has been previously stored with a keyword or search information. Also, the search is possible only by the keywords the user previously specified. In other words, the search is not possible using character strings or search information not previously specified by the user. Hence it is extremely difficult to optimize the search keys for future searches, and a good selection of the character strings and the search information is often costly.
The system (b) generates a character, a character string or data string through character matching processing, natural language processing, statistical processing or calendar processing. It is then registered to the database either with the input information, without the input information, or as the search information of the input information. Pre-processing such as character matching requires large processing cost, which is likely to overload mobile objects with a limited processing power due to the need for low energy consumption and small sizes. This inevitably causes a delay in registering the input information. Although a solution is to use the processing resources of other computers on the network via communication, the communication procedure also takes time.
The system (c) simply searches the position or the identifier of mobile objects, and does not have the function of attaching the position information of a mobile object to the input information from the mobile object. It is not possible, therefore, to search the input information from a mobile object using the position information of the mobile object.
Bibliographic material related to the systems (a), (b) and (c) described above are found in the Japanese Unexamined Patent Publication No. 6-205457, Japanese Unexamined Patent Publication No. 5-281902 and the Technical Report of IEICE EID93-88, HC93-55, December 1993, pp. 7-12. Japanese unexamined Patent Publication No. 6-205457 discloses a means to reduce the cost of registering position information to the network of mobile objects when many mobile objects move simultaneously, by receiving the signal from the mobile terminals at a base station and storing the position information of the mobile terminals in a database. Japanese unexamined Patent Publication No. 5-281902 publicly discloses a means to accurately capture the current positions of mobile objects by transmitting the current position information and calculating the position information using a road map database. The above Technical Report of IEICE publicly discloses a means to save raster image information of hand written letters after recognizing and converting it to text information that consists of a character code.